Not as iconic as the original but entertaining enough

Its taken 20 years for this movie to finally get released, and in a way, the storyline makes good use of that long delay between movies to come up with plausible reasoning for the advancement seen on screen.

We had twenty years to prepare. So did they.

However, the story is merely perfunctory, that it's taken Emmerich and Devlin 20 years to come up with this particular story is frankly a mystery, it's basically a retread of the original movie, with some different scenes to give it a bit more scope....... but I have no idea why it took 20 years to figure it out.

Still, the storyline we get, works.

The technology in the movie IS pretty neat

I liked seeing what the makers of the film were able to dream up as far as how we would assimilate the alien tech with our own. There is a lot of cool eye candy here.

There were some complaints from some over the CGi shown in the trailer, those complaints are entirely misplaced. The VFX for this movie is fantastic throughout, however, there is something distinctly iconic about some of the scenes in the original movie that are very hard to beat for simple visual presence, clearly the VFX in Resurgence are magnitudes better, but I think the original utilised them better.

Entirely forgettable

The music score? Entirely forgettable. It's not just that i've seen ID4 quite a few times which is why I remember the music so well, it's a great score which is why it's remembered. I have no clue whatsoever why it wasn't used again in this movie, and its omission was a stupid decision. It's not that the music on offer was bad, I simply cannot remember even one cue or beat from it at all.

Old stars from the 1996 movie

What I liked about the movie was to see the old stars from the 1996 movie back, well almost all of them(no Will Smith but that's fine).

All the actors did fine, none of the younger actors irritated, no-one tried to do a Will Smith or a Randy Quaid impression, and to be brutally honest, I didn't miss Will Smith at all.

I thought I saw the Thor actor Chris Hemsworth as the lead, took me some time to figure out it's his younger brother here, Liam Hemsworth..it's bit hard to tell them apart (the voice, the smile so similar). Maika Monroe as Liam's fiancée gets a strong role too and does well. Rest of the younger gang make their presence felt very well like Jessie Usher (in almost as strong a role as Liam's as another fighter pilot & as Vivia's grown son), Angelababy (a Chinese pilot), Nicolas Wright(a government aide I think), Travis Tope(Liam's co-pilot) or Charlotte Gainsbourg(a researcher & Jeff's new love interest). I was pleasantly surprised to see Joey King here. Remember brave kid Emily from Roland's White House down? She has grown! Her role isn't as good or long as was in White House down, but maybe she did this for Roland :)

Twice as Much Action, But Not as Fun

It's a sci-fi hokum to entertain for a couple of hours, and me and my son were entertained enough that should the obvious setup for a sequel come about, we'd go and see it.

Hey it's a Roland Emmerich film, expect good action. Or watch it for these older dashing guys, they still pack the same punch as in the original and you may not feel that let down after all.

Its not as good as ID4, but it has a certain charm about it, and it's better than recent Roland Emmerich fare.